[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome back to the show Douglas Fisher. Doug is a professor at San Diego State University and co-founder of Health Sciences High and Middle College and the author of numerous books, many with John Hattie and Nancy Fry, including their latest, which we're here to talk about today, The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12, Teaching for Engagement and Impact in Any Setting.
[00:40] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:43] SPEAKER_00:
Doug, welcome back to Principal Center Radio. Thank you. Hi, Justin. Nice to see you. This spring, Doug, we saw the profession kind of, you know, thrust involuntarily into distance learning or what you called crisis teaching. What did you see as the difference between that kind of initial wave of crisis teaching that, you know, that we were forced to do and thinking longer term, distance learning more properly conceived?
[01:10] SPEAKER_01:
So I think one thing I worry about is for parents and for teachers to call what happened in spring distance learning is really unfair. It's pandemic teaching, it's quarantine teaching, it's crisis teaching. We did the best we could under a rapidly changing situation. We did not have time to plan. Most of us were designing learning experiences, finding things we could, plopping them into learning management systems, you know, haphazard. But in our defense, we were doing the best we could.
[01:39]
Now we have some time to reflect on the experience, figure out what worked and actually engage in purposeful and intentional learning experiences for students. When you read the research on distance learning, you know, John does, John Hattie has all these effect sizes. The effect size of distance learning is very low. And so people say, oh, it doesn't work. But the effect size is low because when you study distance learning versus physical school, There's essentially no difference. The setting is not the determiner.
[02:08]
It's what you do with the time you have. So I think moving forward, we should be saying distance learning, recognizing the heroic efforts to reach kids in the March, April, May, June timeframe of 2020.
[02:24] SPEAKER_00:
I remember being up at my kid's school for parent-teacher conferences in early March. And at that time, it still felt like something that was kind of far away. You know, the idea of schools closing, the idea of this really impacting us, you know, way out here, we're in kind of a small town in a rural area and we saw teachers getting packets ready. We saw the photocopier just spitting out these huge packets that would be sent home if they needed to. And we thought, wow, I don't, I don't even know if that's going to be necessary, but very quick, like within 24 hours, the announcement had been made, the packets were sent home and it, it definitely became a reality that, you know, that, that hit very, very hard and very quickly. And as you said, we weren't really ready for it.
[03:05]
It was an incredible response as a profession. You know, I think people really rose to the occasion, but it didn't give us the time we need as a profession to really design those learning experiences for our students. And you say something in the playbook that really stuck with me. The idea that we can return better than before. And that stuck with me because, you know, none of us would have chosen this. You know, we didn't want this to happen.
[03:31]
And we wouldn't say it's better that we can't meet with our students in person. Why do you believe we have an opportunity to return better than before?
[03:39] SPEAKER_01:
So I'll give you a couple examples. So social emotional learning has kind of been on the periphery in a lot of places. It's in the extracurricular space or it's in the hidden curricular space. And I think there is widespread understanding now of the value of social-emotional learning across the great spans, whether you're teenagers or very young kids. I think we've learned that lesson. And whenever we come back, distance or physical, we will be more attuned to the social-emotional needs of our students.
[04:07]
There were, for decades, people attending to it, but not on the widespread scale we're seeing discussed today. Another thing I think about, there's some research been published, Graham Nuthall and others, that somewhere between 40 and 60% of instructional minutes are spent on things kids have already learned. When we went to crisis teaching, we really focused on what they had to learn right now. And we didn't waste time because we didn't have any time to waste. Every minute we had with kids was precious. And I hope we return with that.
[04:37]
We don't need to spend lots of minutes on things kids have already learned. It's just common practice. We teach them what they need to know now. And so I think there are some things we're learning You know, the value of collaboration, you know, in the beginning of crisis teaching, there wasn't a lot of student to student interaction. It was get online, go on your learning management system, you know, do some tasks. And we recognize that students need to be talking to each other.
[05:03]
And so now I think about with what we've learned, In the future, if we go back to school physically, why wouldn't we record our direct instruction and our teacher modeling and let them watch it over and over again? You can't rewind the teacher during direct instruction, but you certainly could go back to a video five times if you needed to, or if your family needs you to. I'm going to privilege student to student interaction when I'm around so I can scaffold that.
[05:26] SPEAKER_00:
I love it. And I think that's one of the things that we realized very quickly was kind of missing from a lot of approaches is that interaction. And it feels like it's just my kid and a device and some instructions, but not really that interaction. And of course, we struggled with how much to put kids in front of teachers teaching live versus, as you said, prerecorded. Lots of experiential learning that we've done as a profession since then. Let's talk about that collaborative aspect because this has been a little bit tricky to figure out.
[05:55]
How do we get kids interacting productively and especially interacting meaningfully around a task? You say that the task that we give students to do, the tasks that we choose as learning activities are critically important in an online setting. So why is that? And then how can we get students talking and working together around those tasks?
[06:16] SPEAKER_01:
So when we started, I want to honor the 74 teachers, Australia, Alaska, California, Hawaii, and Texas, who let Nancy and I join their sessions, coach them, process with them, plan with them, and learn from them. 74 people said, let's do this. Let's figure this out. And in the beginning, honestly, it was rough. Um, and what started to emerge across many of them was an instructional design in the previous work we've done around instruction. It's very time limited.
[06:47]
So you have your two hour literacy block or your math time or your fourth period class. Well, in distance learning time is way less relevant. And kids can do things in whatever order they choose to do them. So we noticed that the impact lessons had four components, but they weren't all in a lesson. So there was some demonstrations or demonstrating learning. So there's think alouds and things like that.
[07:07]
There was some guiding and facilitating going on, and there was a lot of practicing going on. And then the fourth part of the highly effective teacher's design was this collaboration. They figured out how to spend the time they had synchronously getting students to interact with one another, using academic language, thinking skills, all the things we want. So sometimes they would use breakout rooms and give a very specific task and a very specific time limit. So reflecting on this, I can't tell how many times myself and other teachers will say, okay, you have four minutes to do this. There's no timer set.
[07:42]
And then all of a sudden it's 10 minutes later and they're still not back together. Well, in a Zoom meeting or in some sort of group meeting, you set the timer. When the timer's over, they all come back because the computer says come back and it shuts down the rooms. So we became very efficient with time, which was really cool. And if students needed more time, we could return them to the breakout rooms, but it forced us to notice that. The task has to be meaningful.
[08:08]
Now, some districts have policies where you can't use breakout rooms. And, you know, they're worrying about bullying, but I would like to remind us that if the teacher's in one side of the room and the kids are working collaboratively, they can bully on the other side of the room. But there are districts that have it. So we started seeing teachers in those systems doing fishbowls. where they would share the whiteboard and divide it into like five or six, and each kid would have a place in the whiteboard to contribute, and the peers watching the fishbowl would use the reaction buttons to react to their peers. They were using the chat function to react to their peers.
[08:42]
It became real interesting to watch, even in situations where you were not allowed to put them in a breakout room, the teachers that really impacted kids were able to figure out collaborative tasks. We even started to see kids, upper elementary students start to form book clubs, which was really cool. And they would schedule time with their family's permission. Some of them were FaceTime. They figured out how to have time to meet with their team reading a book, not with their teacher present. And so it was really fun to watch.
[09:19]
some of those kids come back to a synchronous session telling their teacher they spent three times meeting in their book club. So they would read a little bit, they would meet with the book club, they would read a little bit, they would meet with their book club. And that just shows the power
[09:32] SPEAKER_00:
of students needing to connect talk process ideas with other people it's so different from the kind of grim you know my my kid locked in you know a tablet basically to do their own you know kind of solo practice work that you know that we kind of fear and envision that might be the outcome of of too much distance learning that's that's not been designed well uh and again i really appreciate the importance of or the emphasis on uh designing a task that is group worthy and and you know, thinking through, you know, what really, what kind of interaction would make this better? What kind of interaction would make this really come alive for kids? And seeing that as a design challenge that has everything to do with, you know, how much kids engage, how much kids want to show up. I want to make sure we talk about student engagement in just a moment.
[10:23]
But first I want to talk about equity a little bit because obviously some of our biggest concerns around distance learning and some of the pieces that we feel like we can't address nearly as well in any kind of remote setting are around kids who really need support from their teachers. They need the safety of a school environment. What are some of the things that we can and can't do when it comes to equity and meeting some of those needs when we're in a distance learning setting?
[10:51] SPEAKER_01:
And I think that is the very first thing that systems should be talking about is equity, because we run the risk of contributing to all kinds of gaps in this in this situation. The reality is kids cannot in many communities be physically present at school. So we have to do our work. I'm really proud of the districts that immediately started getting devices into kids' hands. The district San Diego Unified, 40,000 devices went out in a matter of weeks with access to Wi-Fi. They mobilized the kitchens so people had food to eat.
[11:25]
So we worked hard on those access issues. There are places that are super remote that don't have Wi-Fi. Some of the teachers in Alaska, We're doing a once a week drop. On Fridays, they would bring their Chromebooks back. Over the weekend, the tech staff would upload new material and they would pick them back up on Monday. I mean, people did heroic things.
[11:47]
I'll add to that. So I think teachers, when they have synchronous lessons with the whole class, also need to have some small group lessons. And some kids don't need that. They can go off and work. Their parents are home. They can monitor them while they're also working.
[12:04]
And some kids need much more intentional small group experiences with their teacher. We're also recording a whole bunch of English learner lessons, for example, that are language development focused. We're using video import systems that allow little quiz functions. And so students are listening to a conversation. They have to write in the response that they would say next. The quiz function in the tool We'll tell them if they're right or wrong.
[12:30]
They can rewatch it again. So we're really trying to meet this need. But for some families, the parents have to go to work. They're essential workers. There's some reality out there. In one of our school districts, they have surveyed the families.
[12:47]
They have about 45,000 kids in the district. And 1,200 kids are kids of essential workers, and they have figured out a way to have those kids on campus supervised but doing distance learning. So people are really trying this, and I think it's the right question to ask at the central office level is, how are we delivering on the promise of equity during a pandemic? How do we maintain our goal for equity at this time? And the answer is not to give everybody the same thing. The answer is to figure out what the needs are and work our best to make that happen.
[13:24] SPEAKER_00:
It occurs to me that one of the opportunities here is to stop seeing the individual teacher or the individual classroom as the source of all of the resources that are made available to students. And I think when it comes especially to English language learners, often we have problems of differentiation and time to differentiate and time to create materials and resources for differentiation. And especially if our English language learners are a very small percentage, if we have one or two students in every classroom, it's very easy to overlook them. But as you said, at the district level or even at the level of the profession more broadly, very, very easy for a video made in one classroom or by one particular teacher or specialist to be used in dozens or even thousands of classrooms to meet students' needs. But I appreciate your point that like we have to start there. We have to think about that first or else it's not going to happen.
[14:16] SPEAKER_01:
Here's an example of that. Just I'll give you an example of that exact thing. So across our state of California, some districts canceled professional learning communities thinking they were doing a service to teachers because there's a stressful time. Well, meaning other districts maintained this professional learning departments, et cetera. The places that maintained it actually reduced teacher stress because teachers had connections to their colleagues. And in this one teacher we're following in first grade, she and her team divided up the curriculum, and they all recorded different parts of it and shared it with each other.
[14:48]
And in other schools where they were not connected to their colleagues, they were all having to do everything themselves, and the anxiety was so high. So let's not forget we have connections and relationships with other people, and we don't have to be the only source. Now, the live sessions, each teacher did. But one teacher took all the phonics, all the spelling and all the writing, another took all the reading instruction, another took all the math. And it was amazing to watch what they were able to accomplish.
[15:13] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I'm interested in the things that we end up no longer doing, you know, the things that we stopped doing as a result of this. And if teaching in silos and if everybody kind of doing their own thing and duplicating work because we all want to do things independently is one of the things that we let go of. I think that that definitely could be a positive. One of the concerns that's been at the back of my mind throughout all of this is that if we get too good at distance learning, there may be people who say, you know what? keeping school buildings open is really expensive. Why don't we just do distance learning all the time?
[15:46]
Because, you know, that would be a lot cheaper. That would be a lot easier. And if the effect size of distance learning is pretty neutral, why not save the money we can make do with fewer teachers, fewer buildings and so on? How do we get good at this without also
[16:02] SPEAKER_01:
Welcoming in a lot of the the downsides that would come from making too many of these changes permanent I think right now we need to make distance learning as good as it can be it for me personally It's not going to replace kids coming together Spending time in the presence of other human beings their age or similar ages that we are social animals we want to spend time with other human beings and I think there's some things we're going to learn. I wonder about instructional minutes, for example. I mean, how many minutes do you need for things? What kind of things should you be doing at home? I think this could really accelerate the whole idea of flipped learning. I think when we come back and we're better at it, I think we're going to have whole new level of expectation because we are finally recognizing that learning occurs well beyond the doors of our classrooms.
[16:52]
And if we figure out how to engage students, yes, they're going to be with us for six hours, seven hours or whatever, but that's not where learning stops. And so I don't predict a future where it's only distance learning parents. The community wants kids to be around other kids, interacting. There are some things that we're kind of suspending. Like right now, how do you resolve conflict with your friends? You know, you log out of Zoom, you're done.
[17:23]
How do you negotiate that? How do you learn those skills in this? I haven't figured that out yet. I'm pretty good. I think we're good at getting, you know, how do you learn math? How do you learn that?
[17:31]
You know, we're good at that. But there's other things that school does. the routines, the procedures, the getting up and going someplace, the interacting with other people, that physically and negotiating relationships and having a conflict that you resolve, that's gonna be a need that we have after this.
[17:51] SPEAKER_00:
Well, and let's talk about some of those routines and procedures, because, you know, certainly as a new teacher, I was given, you know, three copies of Harry Wong's first days of school. And, you know, we put a lot of effort into preparing for those opening weeks of the school year where we teach those routines and procedures and establish a classroom culture. And this will be a year when we're doing everything. all of that virtually in a lot of places, maybe not everywhere, but a lot of schools really are starting virtually and not wanting to put off all of that, you know, culture building and establishing until we actually meet in person. What are some strategies for doing that virtually and starting off the year in a virtual setting with our students?
[18:32] SPEAKER_01:
Great question. So, um, I think it's about what did you do before and how does that translate to this environment? We didn't forget how to teach. And what we know about the beginning of the school year is the excitement, your new clothes, you're ready for school. The routines that you start with, you start with expectations, you start with classroom promises or rules. We do that.
[18:56]
How do we enter? Where do our things go? All the things that we did before, we need to figure out how to convey that. we also need to establish our credibility and our relationships with our students. So we have to bring the passion. We have to bring the dynamism.
[19:10]
We have to bring the immediacy. We need to think through those things. If you're a teacher who dressed up You know, at different things, you know, like I have history teachers who dress up at home. So, you know, so the kids see you. If you're not a dress up teacher, which I'm not, how do you bring it to the kids? So those are going to be important things to start off with.
[19:31]
I was saying recently that, you know, the luck of the draw was we closed schools on March 13th. Teachers and students already had relationships that we could draw on to finish the year. And I was lamenting this start of school year and student teacher relationships. And this person sent me a tweet, a direct message on tweet and said, stop saying that. That's all she said. And I wrote her back and I said, why?
[19:52]
I don't get it. I'm very worried about teacher student relationships. And she said, I've been married to my husband for 20 years. The first year of our relationship was distance. People can develop relationships from a distance. And I kind of thought about that.
[20:07]
Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, that's not the relationship we're looking for, but human beings do develop relationships from a distance. We crave relationships. So maybe I need to less worry about that now and more worry about the routines and procedures and getting things normal for kids. I'm actually now more worried about what time kids are going to sleep than I am about the teachers and the relationships. I think in the pandemic, all those routines for bedtime went away.
[20:32]
All those routines for mornings went away and we're going to need parents and teachers to bring that back. Here's when classes start. You have to have a good night's sleep. We know the research on sleep. You don't go to sleep whenever you want. You don't go to sleep at midnight.
[20:49]
So I think those are some of the things I really want to think about. How do you establish routines at home? How do you create an environment for a kid? This is where learning occurs. And when you're in this environment, these are the behaviors we're looking for. But then you go to this environment because it's in your house and you're allowed to have these behaviors.
[21:05]
I think those are the things that are going to be really important as we move forward.
[21:09] SPEAKER_00:
And one thing I want to mention that we haven't really yet is that the book is set up as a reflective space, as kind of a workbook or a playbook, as you say, to think through some of those questions. And if I normally do X to establish my classroom culture and routines and procedures, I still need to do those same things. I just may do them a little bit differently in a virtual setting. And I want to make sure we talk about a related issue, which is the idea of routines and kind of a setup and self-care on the part of educators. Why is it so important for teachers to have a dedicated workspace, you know, knowing that, you know, I'm recalling the size of my Seattle apartment when I was a teacher in the first couple of years, and it was tiny. I mean, my office right now is the size of my almost entire house.
[21:58]
for. How can teachers set up their routines and their workspace to, you know, to maximize their success and well-being?
[22:05] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah. And that's the first module in this playbook, take care of yourself, because that is an important message for educators. So most of us as teachers, we did not sign up to be work at home people. We are not, you know, IT consultants doing, you know, work at home. So we don't have routines for work at home. We are very accustomed to getting up and going someplace else and then leaving there to go to our homes.
[22:29]
Now our homes are our workplace. So like other professions where there's a whole bunch of research on work at home, the difference being the people who worked at home before the pandemic could go socialize with friends and go out to dinner and movies and things like that, which now we don't. But there is evidence about that. So starting your day with a routine, ending having a signal when work is over, having a dedicated space so it's not random around your house and stressful and I don't have my things. And again, it's the behavior. So when you set up a tiny little space to work in your house, that's work.
[23:02]
And it signals your brain, this is where I work. And when I'm not here, I do other things with my family, with my friends, et cetera. And so those routines help us maintain a life work balance They help us actually reduce our stress because they become very predictable. There's also in the playbook a recommendation to find a commitment or accountability partner. So whatever your wellness plan is, talk with someone that you trust, decide how often you're going to check in because the evidence says if you have a commitment partner or an accountability partner, you're way more likely to take care of yourself. And I think that's important for teachers.
[23:42]
We go above and beyond as it is. And I'm hearing stories of teachers who 10 o'clock at night, they're still trying to connect with kids and Zoom with kids. And I appreciate the effort. It's not sustainable. As one of my friends, Ricky, says a lot, remember what the airplane people used to say, the flight attendants say, put your own oxygen mask on first. You cannot fill the cup of another if yours is empty.
[24:06]
We've got to take care of ourselves.
[24:08] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And one of the things that I've noticed since this kind of became how we do things is I do all of my work on a laptop, but I've noticed lately that the laptop stays in the office and I just need that separation. If I'm going to be at home all of the time, I need to not be at work all of the time also. So that separation, having a dedicated space. Let's talk about some of those implications for students as well, because you talk in the book about, you know, if students are going to be on a webcam, if they are going to be, you know, logging in, you know, they need that space as well. What are some recommendations for the student side of that setup?
[24:45] SPEAKER_01:
Yeah, well, I'm going to say this one and I get a lot of pushback on this. I don't think kids should be in live sessions in their bedrooms. I just think we need to try to avoid that if possible. Now, that's idealistic. I understand that it may not be realistic for all families. But I really want to think about like the mindset of a kid.
[25:05]
I'm in my bedroom. I'm not in a learning environment. And as a reminder, and I don't want to get too weird out about this. There are lots of other people in other people's homes looking what's happening. So other people are looking inside your kid's bedroom too. And so I just worry about that.
[25:22]
So I would love it if kids had a little tiny dedicated space. There's a family that I know here in San Diego. They converted their dining room and there are four desks. The parents have desks and the two kids have desks. They wear headphones. They schedule their Zoom meetings and they go to work together.
[25:40]
And that family, it's really productive from them. They're all doing their stuff. And that works for them. And they got their kids out of their bedrooms to engage in the learning. And then they go to their bedrooms and they play and they do other things. Now, I understand not all families have that resource.
[25:56]
Sometimes there are 12 people living in a one bedroom. I get that. But find a place for your kid to work. Here's the thing I learned recently. A lot of young people, starting around third grade or fourth grade, don't like to look at themselves all day long. They're not accustomed to looking at themselves all day long, and they're very self-conscious when they look at themselves.
[26:16]
And we learned that in most of the platforms out there, you can turn off the self view. And so in our summer school program, we started teaching students to turn off the self view. All of a sudden, camera time went on. And remember, as a teacher, when you can see your learner's face, you have a way of judging whether they're understanding, whether you can go faster or slow down. when you just talk to little squares that are empty, you don't really know what's their thinking process. So if you can get them to turn the cameras on, it's awesome.
[26:47]
Now, some families don't want you peering in their homes. I get that. But if you can get the camera on, and you don't have to make the young person self-conscious by turning off self-view, it's great. We're all learning. This is what we have to be sharing with each other. Who knew I would know that three weeks ago?
[27:05]
But now I do. And so now when I log in, I remind students to turn off the self-view. And all of a sudden, the participation is way higher.
[27:12] SPEAKER_00:
Wow, yeah, that never occurred to me that you can turn that off and that that would actually make a difference to kids. But yeah, that nonverbal and even though this is a podcast, we're talking on video now because it's easier to have that conversation face to face. And you talk in the book about maybe having students sit with just kind of a blank wall behind them so that that's what's on camera. What are some other strategies for maybe, you know, even if there's not a lot of physical space, not a lot of privacy within the home, any other strategies for helping students kind of carve out some private space or at least, you know, something where, you know, nobody's walking by in the background and, you know, things like that?
[27:50] SPEAKER_01:
As strange as this sounds, one of my high schoolers cleared out part of his closet and hung some stuff out and created like a little studio for himself in his closet and it's really creative and he goes in there there's a little chair a little stool that he sits on there's a back the stuff behind him and it's private for him now it is in his bedroom but you don't see his bed and that kind of stuff so that works for him we're seeing elementary kids who create little blanket tents and when they go in there that's their school And so you might have two or three of those around. And right now we're gonna live with that as family members is that's where you go to school. So there's this blanket tent in whatever room.
[28:32]
So people are being super creative about creating space for children to do their learning time.
[28:38] SPEAKER_00:
And I remember the idea of even like a, you know, an old science fair trifold board, you know, if you've got multiple kids who need to share kind of a small space that could even create some of that privacy and sound insulation for, you know, five bucks or whatever it costs to buy one of those for a student.
[28:53] SPEAKER_01:
I know a lot of parents are worried about, you know, the space and stuff like that. So they tend to spy on their kids while their kids are in live sessions. And I do want to remind us all, our students are used to, their children have some privacy when they go to school, you know, We don't, as the parents, we don't watch every minute of all the instruction they receive. And so when we do distance learning, let's have the parents, you know, like you're allowed to go do other things in your home while your kid's in a live session. You don't have to hover and watch everything because your kids might not want to make mistakes. They might not want to take risks with mom or dad or grandma somewhere right there hovering.
[29:31] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Doug, I agree completely that as educators, we have a much better sense of what the other person is thinking, whether that's a colleague or a student that we're working with, when we can see them face to face. And now that we have webcams and video conferencing technology, that's certainly more feasible remotely than it ever has been before. How do we take advantage of that technology to increase student engagement? Because certainly we don't want to just be issuing assignments and grading assignments. We really want some of the dynamism and interactivity of learning to really be there. So how do we set things up for that interaction and that engagement?
[30:08] SPEAKER_01:
Well, there was this old engagement model that said you're behaviorally engaged, cognitively engaged, and emotionally engaged. Well, and so we started with that, like, well, that's the model that most people know that most leaders think about is the student behaviorally engaged, cognitively engaged and emotionally engaged. Well, John Hattie said, it turns out that's not very predictive of whether or not you learn things. It's descriptive, but not very predictive. And there's a better model for engagement. And it's been written about several times, and it's actually predictive of learning.
[30:38]
And it's a model that has disengagement and engagement as well. So I'm going to focus on the engagement side. And it talks about if you're participating, that's a lower level of engagement. But if you end up driving your own learning, that's a much higher level of learning. So if we can figure out how to change the task from students participating in things to them driving the task. So what goals do I have?
[30:59]
How will I accomplish this? How will I show you what I'm successful with? If we move to driving, students vote with their feet and they do more of it. And I think that's an area that we can talk more about is how can we create the tasks that the students feel they're driving their own learning. And that's actually predictive that they will learn more the further they go down that continuum of engagement, which I think is pretty cool thing to learn during this pandemic. The other thing that the research pre pandemic on distance learning is frequent low stakes assessment engages learners.
[31:33]
So we will have to think through that. It cannot be high stakes and it has to occur a lot. So we use systems where we embed video into a quiz function. It's worth almost nothing. They can do it as many times as they want. They can go back and watch the video again and get the answers.
[31:48]
They can get a hundred percent. It doesn't matter. It's the frequent low stakes assessment that drives the engagement. And when we do that kind of stuff and the system gives the teacher information, you can look at what errors did they make the first attempt? What errors did they make their second attempt? So you can monitor this and figure out what you need to do in a live session.
[32:10] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Doug, I really appreciate the way the playbook has been built as a reflective tool, as a planning tool, as a self-care tool, as just an overall guide to thinking through the big things we need to think through in order to be successful with distance learning. And I noticed that in each chapter, you even have learning intentions and success criteria for the reader, for the educator who's going through the book. And certainly, Many of the approaches that you and Nancy have championed in previous books, things like social-emotional learning, John Hattie's work on effect sizes and knowing your impact, just shine through so brightly here. And at the time we're recording this interview, this is the number one selling book in education on Amazon, and I think we're going to see just a huge impact from the work that people do because of this book. So again, thank you for your commitment to the profession and for creating the Distance Learning Playbook.
[33:03]
If people want to learn more about your work, Doug, or maybe learn about upcoming events that you may have going on, where's the best place for them to find you online?
[33:12] SPEAKER_01:
Twitter is DFisherSDSU. And then our website is FisherAndFry, A-N-D. And her last name is spelled F-R-E-Y, FisherAndFry.com.
[33:21] SPEAKER_00:
Doug Fisher, thanks so much for joining me again on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Justin.
[33:26] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
